If you thought heads were reserved for polite nodding or bobble‑doll decoration, prepare for a macabre re-education! In ‘Severed‘, anthropologist Frances Larson embarks on a globe‑trotting, time‑travelling crime against decency – tracking human heads, lost, stolen, studied and enshrined. It’s art history meets crime scene meets Stanley Kubrick, but with far more teeth…
Larson’s premise is deceptively simple: follow the trajectory of severed heads – war spoils, medical specimens, trophy curiosities and you trace a darker narrative of colonialism, science and capital. She begins in Europe, where embalmed or painted heads became salon curiosities. Then she probes the head-hunting cultures of the Pacific Northwest and the Andes, where heads were coveted spiritual items – each telling us something essential about the relationship between the living and the dead.
This isn’t a gentle stroll through rarefied halls. Larson treats her material with sophistication and without flinching: the collector’s demand for shrunken heads, anthropologists slicing and measuring skulls for racial theories, museums displaying grotesque trophies all the while hiding colonial violence behind glass.
What makes Severed more than a horror‑curio catalog is Larson’s lens: serious, unsentimental and sharply attuned to the ethics of each decapitation. She doesn’t moralise, she lets the stories do the moral work, but you come away uneasy, aware that each head is a story of power, dispossession, belief, or sometimes, just blunt curiosity.
You won’t breeze through it in one sitting, this is curated darkness, best consumed in short sittings sprinkled with hearty gulps of tea. But Larson’s prose has a way of lingering in your mind – an unsettling, curious ache. It’s the kind of book that leaves you scanning old photos or museum exhibits and wondering whose skull you’re really seeing behind that display glass.
In quieter hands, this might feel like a grim slide deck. Instead, Larson delivers a solemn yet engaging anthropology lesson, where each chapter flips another piece of our collective detachment toward the dead. Like a museum docent unveiling the disturbing backstory of a glossy artefact, she ensures you never look at a mounted skull (or the history it’s tethered to) the same way again.
Severed is part dark academia, part forensic odyssey and entirely a reminder: history’s fascination with heads is no trivia; it’s a tangled story of violence, ideology and remembrance. Read it with a clear head – because what remains afterward is anything but…!
Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever.
From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.
